Hartel, J.: ¬The case against Information and the Body in Library and Information Science (2018)
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- Abstract
- What follows is an editorial that makes a case against the development of an empirical research frontier in library and information science (LIS) devoted to information and the body. My goal is to offer a sober and constructive counterbalance to this Library Trends special issue that is otherwise uncritical of its proposition. In asserting that original research into embodied information may be unproductive for our field, I draw from my personal experience and reflections as well as foundational conceptions of LIS from past and contemporary luminaries. My conclusion reminds all stakeholders in this Library Trends special issue of the many fascinating and urgent research questions that remain unanswered within the conventional boundaries of LIS.
In 2003 I was a doctoral student at the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and happily learning information behavior under Marcia Bates. I enrolled in a methodology seminar offered through the Sociology Department entitled Ethnography, Ethnomethodology, and Symbolic Interactionism, taught by the late Melvin Pollner. Our class read a book-length ethnography of one sociologist's experience as the paid caretaker of a teenage girl living with severe mental and motor impairments; the study reported the sexual way the child pressed her body against her older, male assistant during their daily routine and the inexorable sexual response of his body-two haptic forms of embodied information. The aspiring sociologists and anthropologists in the course found these microsocial physical dynamics to be riveting and discussed their meaning for two hours. The next week our enlightened professor assigned an article by Lucy Suchman about the coordinated flow of information via documents in a workplace-a brilliant paper. To my surprise, my classmates were dismissive of Suchman's study. One budding sociologist remarked, "Well, the research design is solid, but it's all about these [End Page 585] documents. I mean . who really cares?" This flippant criticism left me speechless, while everyone else in the class laughed in agreement (excepting the magnanimous Dr. Pollner).
- Footnote
- Vgl.: DOI: 10.1353/lib.2018.0018. Vgl. auch den Kommentar in: Lueg, C.: To be or not to be (embodied): that is not the question. In: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 71(2020) no.1, S.114-117. (Opinion paper) Two articles in a recent special issue on Information and the Body published in the journal Library Trends stand out because of the way they are identifying, albeit indirectly, a formidable challenge to library information science (LIS). In her contribution, Bates warns that understanding information behavior demands recognizing and studying "any one important element of the ecology [in which humans are embedded]." Hartel, on the other hand, suggests that LIS would not lose much but would have lots to gain by focusing on core LIS themes instead of embodied information, since the latter may be unproductive, as LIS scholars are "latecomer[s] to a mature research domain." I would argue that LIS as a discipline cannot avoid dealing with those pesky mammals aka patrons or users; like the cognate discipline and "community of communities" human computer interaction (HCI), LIS needs the interdisciplinarity to succeed. LIS researchers are uniquely positioned to help bring together LIS's deep understanding of "information" and embodiment perspectives that may or may not have been developed in other disciplines. LIS researchers need to be more explicit about what their original contribution is, though, and what may have been appropriated from other disciplines.
